Throughout the media and entertainment industry, traditional analog processes are being rapidly replaced by all-digital, file-based workflows. At the heart of most digital workflows is the basic requirement to move file-based data between business units, or between companies—from raw media ingest, through post-production, through semi-final dubbing, localization, or replication, to consumer distribution—evermore file based media is moving between entities. For many years, some amount of electronic file transfer has been done through traditional FTP, or dedicated delivery services that offload the delivery to private network services, but in large part, most media is still physically shipped or couriered from place-to-place. There are many reasons for this—file sizes are too large to practically transfer given the poor bandwidth utilization of traditional protocols like FTP, dedicated delivery services have been notoriously expensive, especially for heavy usage, and electronic services are perceived as being not quite ready, insecure, inconvenient, or unproven. We believe that all of these reasons are part of the overarching problem that it is has not before been possible to build a commercial grade electronic file delivery service that minors the physical couriers—that can provide fast, convenient world-wide delivery including an economic model to price and charge back based on delivery time.
There is not yet an electronic file transfer service (or even the economic or technological model to build such) that offers the simple basic qualities of a service like Federal Express®, UPS®, or other commercial couriers. In the physical delivery domain these services allow a user to purchase a delivery time guarantee for a parcel to be moved, potentially world-wide. Pricing depends on when the delivery must arrive, and the size of the parcel. Complete end-to-end tracking is built-in. If demand for the service increases, the price rises; if deliveries are late, users take their business to other couriers. Normal market forces work easily to create a market-bearing price and a system that everyone feels they can live with—if you need your delivery to arrive earlier, you pay more, and, the corollary, if you pay more, you can count on the delivery time purchased.
In contrast, in the electronic file transfer domain, the classic attempt to move files uses traditional FTP, or perhaps a dedicated delivery service that performs the delivery on your behalf. FTP (and traditional TCP-based file transfer protocols) are unreliable over the wide area, fail to utilize bandwidth, and can't guarantee delivery times over networks with variable packet loss and round-trip delay. Even if delivery times could be guaranteed, the service provider offering FTP has no means to creating a meaningful pricing system based on the utility of the delivery to you—when the delivery arrives, and the corresponding cost of that delivery's network usage to other users.
Some companies turn to dedicated delivery services as workarounds; these services may send files over satellite transmission or other expensive infrastructures to help ensure delivery times, and charge the cost of that infrastructure back to the user based on how many bytes a user sends. The pricing becomes prohibitive with usage and sacrifices the benefits of flat-rate commodity Internet bandwidth, in an effort to get some amount of quality of service guarantee.